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Friday, May 10, 2013

Memoirs From the End of the World: Entry #35

It's Friday, which means it's time to return to RC's story. For those who've missed earlier installments, you can find the entire story to date on this PAGE.

Memoirs From the End of the World

Entry #35

In order to ensure that it was safe to
head back to base, the Brock ordered a couple of the rebels to sweep Alyx for
tracking devices, though he insisted he didn’t have any. “My captors didn’t think there was any way I
could escape, so they didn’t bother tagging me with anything.” And, after a thorough checkup, the rebels
confirmed what they’d been told.

The medic, a middle aged man named
Harrison, promptly got to work on Alyx the moment they made it back to safety. RC simply wrapped an old shirt around her bleeding
leg, perfectly content to wait her turn.
It was clear that, though the injury ached plenty, it was nothing more
than a flesh wound. All it required was
a good cleaning and some dressings to keep infection at bay.

Alyx, on the other hand, was beginning to
run a fever. He lay on a clean blanket
while the medic peeled back the denim that barely covered the wounded leg. This soon revealed the source of the
problem. The skin was red and swollen,
the gash itself forced open by the accumulation of dried blood and puss. Clearly tending to the festering wounds of those
bound for execution wasn’t a top priority.

Sickening though the sight, and even the
smell, of the wound were, RC could hardly be bothered by it. Instead she sat beside him and held his hand,
astonished by how warm it felt to the touch.
Ollie hovered nearby, clearly more repulsed by the infected leg than the
rest of them.

“Can you take care of this?” RC
asked. She had no medical expertise to
speak of, but she knew something like this would require strong drugs.

“We’ve managed to steal enough medical
supplies to keep ourselves alive,” Harrison replied. “That includes everything I need to treat
this. He’ll probably be pretty sick for
the next couple of days, but I don’t think we have much to worry about.”

Though Harrison sounded certain, RC still
had her doubts. Maybe those doubts were
based purely on her sense that things tended not to turn out as planned. In either case, she had no intention of
voicing those doubts. Alyx had enough to
worry about already without her piling on more.
It didn’t take long for her to learn just how much guilt he’d already
adopted.

“It was my idea to go back to that house,”
Alyx said quietly. “Everything that
happened . . . it was my fault.”

RC knew by the tone of his voice, and the
weight that hung on the air as he hesitated, precisely what he was admitting
fault for. Though she didn’t want to
speak aloud about the assault committed on her in front of anyone else, she
couldn’t leave him hanging. “I don’t
blame you for anything that happened.
Okay? The idea was a good one,
because we really needed those supplies.
It just didn’t work out.
Everything those creeps did is their fault. They’re the ones to blame. Not you.”

“It wouldn’t have happened at all if we
didn’t go,” he insisted.

“Thinking like that can drive you crazy,”
RC replied.

Ollie winced as he watched the work being
done on Alyx’s leg. Though it seemed as
if he hadn’t been paying attention to anything else, he jumped in on the
conversation. “We’re here now, and we’re
safe, Alyx. There’s no point in beating
yourself up for things you can’t change.”

This was sound advice, but easier said
than done. RC had no doubt he would
continue to flog himself for it all, and she couldn’t change that. She could only be there for him.

The conversation ended abruptly when the
pain of Harrison’s work made it too difficult for Alyx to speak. Sweat beaded on his face, and he squeezed RC’s
hand until her fingers started to turn blue.
She didn’t complain.

After Harrison finished, Alyx fell into a
restless sleep. After RC’s leg was
tended to, she also lay down for a nap.
The day had been so exhausting, both physically and emotionally, that
she needed the downtime. And lying there
next to Alyx, though he shivered with fever, was comforting. Even in this insane world, the good could
survive. RC had felt the encroaching
cynicism more than once, but having Alyx back held it at bay.

As the days passed, RC found reassurance
in the fact that Alyx’s fever broke and his leg visibly improved. Her own wound healed nicely. The rebels came and went, going about errands
that they seldom discussed with the rest of them. Ollie, however, went out of his way to make
friends with Brock, and he even persuaded the man to let him accompany them on
a couple routine supply runs.

Over the course of those first days, RC
didn’t talk with Alyx about anything that happened to her while trapped in that
house. Even though she didn’t remember
any of it, just knowing it happened was enough to make her run from it. And Alyx, who knew far more about what took
place than she did, never brought it up.
He probably didn’t want to face it any more than she did.

Still, some realities rear their heads
and demand you to take notice whether you want to or not. Though the scrapes and bruises that came from
her time in that awful house faded relatively quickly, the consequences of her
time there weren’t about to go away. As
days turned to weeks, RC felt increasingly unsettled. She just felt . . . off. Not her normal self. It could have been attributed to a lot of
things, of course.

Then she woke one morning, only to
abruptly throw up. The nausea lingered,
and she couldn’t escape the reality of what it meant.

I Survived!

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About Me

I am many things: a writer, a mother, a wife, a certified nutcase. Well, maybe not certified. No one ever had me tested. My characters exist in my head like multiple personalities. I deal with my insanity by putting it on paper for others to read.